9 - Summarizing the Revolution

Summary

In Chapters 2–7, I argued that England's constitution underwent crucial reforms after the Glorious Revolution enhancing the credibility of several kinds of sovereign promise. In this chapter, I first summarize what the “crucial reforms” were. My account differs from North and Weingast's (1989) and Acemoglu and Robinson's (2012), as I explain by reference to a weakest-link theory of executive constraint.

This chapter also summarizes the consequences of constraining the executive. For each kind of sovereign promise, I review when parliamentary monopolies emerged, when monopoly brokers appeared, and when sales boomed. In each case, I attribute market expansion to the creation of monopoly brokerage in the respective markets, and explain why alternative theories of sovereign credibility fail to provide a persuasive account of market expansion.

I then reconsider the role of preferences in sustaining sovereign credibility. I argue that, once Parliament had a monopoly in a given area of law, the tactics promise holders used to secure performance shifted. Promise holders could abandon their efforts to extract performance from a Machiavellian state, in favor of optimizing the state's reversionary performance. This shift in strategy (and the state's anticipation of it) meant inter alia that all sovereign promises to deliver private goods became transferable. Transferability in turn led to the emergence of brokers and secondary markets, both of which played key roles in assuring that preferences were structurally biased toward performance. Thus, state promises became simultaneously more liquid and more reliable.

I close the chapter with some preliminary comments on the exportation of English parliamentarism to other countries. Many countries have sought to achieve Britain's outcomes – in particular, its military and economic success – by imitating its constitutional design. Only a few have succeeded and it is important to consider why.

What Happened Constitutionally?

When scholars summarize the Revolution's reforms, they stress either parliamentary supremacy or executive constraints. Here are three typical examples:

1. • “First and foremost, the Revolution initiated the era of parliamentary ‘supremacy’” (North and Weingast 1989, p. 816).

2. • “The Glorious Revolution limited the power of the king and the executive, and relocated to Parliament the power to determine economic institutions” (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012, p. 102).

3. • “[T]he Glorious Revolution … consolidated parliamentary ascendancy, limited royal prerogatives and secured private property” (Allen 2009, p. 5).